(What is RSS?)(For later unpacking and exploration, but they seemed potentially rich, even from the flat glimpses I caught today.)
1. Conspicuously-loud-burping-in-the-men’s-room guy.
2. Pageant-blonde-driving-a-white-Ford-Mustang girl.
is in progress. Less serious. More fun. Currently secret, for domain-registration and intellectual property reasons. (Or to reduce failure-related shame.)
of the periodic frame to it. It’s breathed fresh life into my dormant novel and I’m regaining writing momentum.
is developing nicely.
The grid is 18 columns wide and 7 rows deep. The final set of 108 occupied cells is further divided into 3 groups and 12 subgroups. The entire set is divided again by an etiological context (primordial, from decay, synthetic, and undiscovered).
I’ll assign certain criteria to each column, row, group, subgroup and etiology. Then start crafting around those relationships.
I am working on the architectural structure of a story. The cupboards were ceiling-high on the sides with a waist-high section connecting them. I spent the rest of the meeting thinking about the periodic table of the elements, and they why of how it is structured, and the intricacies of the organization: the bookends of the akali elements and the noble gases, the little stairstep from Boron to Polonium of the metalloids, and the nesting steps of the nonmetals from Carbon (and their distant cousin Hydrogen). I found it enthralling and I’m just going to keep working on the shape, and then save it up until I find the perfect story to fit in it, or try to fit in it and break it.
although in the end he failed to follow it himself.
”...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
I’m choosing to think gratefully about all the words DFW left us. Truly, thank you for them sir. They changed my life. They gave me new license.
”...as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”
1 May, Y.D.A.U.
McSweeney’s has summed things up perfectly.
is far from ambitious and perhaps reflective of a tendency to be guilty of the soft bigotry of low self-expectations.
What I probably meant to say is that I want to practice my writing and develop writerly rituals and patterns, for no immediate aim other than the delight it brings me.
I’m working on the patterns now; finding my best writing times and collecting characters and unpacking them to find the stories inside. It’s all sketch and fragment now, but it’s more than I’ve done in over 10 years.
